Getting Defensive: Observations from the National Training Center

Legendary football coach Bear Bryant maintained that “offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships.” As an Army, we love pithy quotations like these—we put them in our signature blocks and emblazon them on unit t-shirts. But Bryant’s words have a particular relevance. They are a clarion call for pursuing success by doing the unglamorous things—like defensive operations, which can win the time and space that could mean the difference between victory and defeat on the battlefield.

But according to an argument made recently by Capt. Harrison Morgan, the Army places too heavy an emphasis on the offense, to the detriment of planning and training for the defense. As the assistant brigade engineer trainer for Bronco Team at the National Training Center (NTC) at Ft. Irwin, California, I’ve seen much that supports Capt. Harrison’s point. That’s unfortunate, because at NTC the defense is probably the best opportunity a rotational unit will have to inflict an outsized level of damage on the opposition force. Over the last seven rotations I’ve been in this position I have not yet seen a brigade fully capitalize on this opportunity in the force-on-force portion of the rotation. Why is this? And what is the remedy?

Is the Army’s emphasis on the offense intrinsic to human nature, or is it related to something distinct in the nature of American warfighting culture? Both. The offense is an intellectually more satisfying operation to plan and execute than the defense. Our flawed understanding of risk and statistics means we gravitate towards concepts with a defined payoff while ignoring defensive measures necessary to mitigate the risk of something terrible, but unlikely. And even in hindsight, when defensive measures work, it’s very hard for us to appreciate the process that kept a disaster from happening. The offense is a discretely defined operation with a defined payoff. The defense is open-ended, has many harder-to-define variables, and often zero easily discernible payoff. The reward for emplacing a successful defense is often empty, as it influences enemy decisions to attack somewhere else or not at all. For these reasons the defense is, fundamentally, a less satisfying concept for the human brain to wrestle with than the offense.

The defense, I believe, also carries a negative connotation in American warfighting culture. We believe that if we’re defending then something has gone wrong. As Capt. Harrison points out, many of the US Army’s worst predicaments were the result of poorly executed defense. And rather than draw the conclusion that we need to defend better, we seem to have associated the defense itself with failure, while avoiding the hard lessons. Many members of the Army have experienced this, as I have: while stationed in Germany, my unit conducted a leader professional development exercise at the D-Day landing site, and while stationed in Korea, we conducted one at the site of the Inchon landing. I don’t recall visiting or studying a major defensive operation in any unit-led LPDs, and I’m an engineer! Going a step further, is there a single defensive operation in US military history that is viewed generally in a positive light? To be sure, attempting to define the entirety of US warfighting culture by identifying the operations the Army holds in highest esteem carries some risk of oversimplification. But I would argue that these operations are almost solely offensive: the Normandy landings, Iwo Jima, the Rough Riders’ charge at San Juan Hill, the Inchon landing, the bayonet charge at Little Round Top, the Battle of Trenton, the First Gulf War, even the westward expansion of our young nation across the continent. And what are the most well known defensive operations? Tet (a US victory which was seen as a defeat in public opinion), the Battle of the Bulge, the Alamo, COP Keating, Chosin Reservoir, Pearl Harbor. The defense has an image problem.

Since the defense is less satisfying to plan and more challenging to execute, and because we associate defense with failure, we then design training for our officers in Army schools focused on offensive operations. Then, in the stress of the decisive-action scenario at NTC, where commanders and staff are sleep-deprived, hungry, too hot or too cold, and desperately trying to salvage the time that is quickly slipping through their fingers, they fall back onto what they know and what they’ve trained for—the offense. At NTC, I’ve seen brigades struggle with the offense, in particular the tenets of breaching. However, their proficiency is generally at a higher level than it is for the defense. Once the brigade has seized what is often a huge amount of terrain, though, the leaders are left with the problem of how to hold all of this ground. Often this is in excess of thirty kilometers of frontage—a huge amount of terrain for a brigade to successfully defend at NTC.

Capt. Harrison argues that the Army should conduct a defensive training exercise for a full armored brigade combat team (ABCT) at the White Sands Training Area in New Mexico against the 1st Armored Division in order to fully explore the 1:3 force ratio that doctrine prescribes for the defense. While this is a novel idea and would be a great training opportunity, we already have ten brigades per year at NTC that go through several full-scale brigade defensive “reps” against a smaller opposition force. And typically, from what I’ve seen, the brigades here struggle to emplace a successful defense against even this smaller force. At our current level of proficiency, a scenario in which an ABCT defends against an entire division would likely not be a productive use of time or money. For it to be useful—and to improve our defensive capabilities generally—we would need to address the following concerns first:

Blade Team Utilization. A typical brigade at NTC will be augmented with 10–14 bulldozers, giving them five to seven blade teams. These dozers should have blades in the ground emplacing survivability positions behind the FLOT (forward line of own troops) and then transition to emplacement of anti-vehicle ditches immediately upon culmination of the offense. In the time-constrained scenarios at NTC the rotational unit cannot afford to have dozers sitting around unemployed—which is a common phenomenon. Most brigades I’ve seen underutilize their blade assets.

Project Management Approach. A good defense is really a construction project built under severe time constraints. Due to an all-too-common lack of accurate reporting, however, many brigade command posts struggle to maintain an accurate understanding of the defensive project. The brigade commander must be able to know when the overall project is 25, 50, and 75 percent complete in order to flex assets for prioritized engagement areas. Most brigades are not maintaining an accurate and timely reporting channel for obstacle emplacement to allow the commander and staff to build an accurate picture. This is likely due to a combination of training shortfalls and the often confusing nature of the command–support relationships and reporting requirements for engineers at the company level.

Training. Typically brigades will conduct offensive breach training prior to arriving at NTC with their organic engineers, but usually no full-scale brigade defensive training. It is harder to train a full-scale defense at home station for several reasons: First, the engineers that augment the BCT at NTC are typically from the reserve component, and it is difficult to incorporate them into training prior to arriving at NTC. Second, the brigade engineer battalion does not have enough engineer dig assets to fully support a brigade defense exercise. And third, defensive training doesn’t scale. A brigade-sized defense with three separate battalion engagement areas is significantly more complex than a single battalion engagement area. For example, the support requirements for class IV construction materials, boundary management, and engagement area prioritization become increasingly complex in a way that is hard to replicate at the smaller scale.

Standards. Due to a lack of training on the defense, both in maneuver units and in the Engineer Regiment, many of our operators and junior noncommissioned officers come to NTC with a shortfall in understanding of the standards for defensive obstacles.

Doctrine. While most maneuver battalion commanders have a good understanding of the tactical meaning of terms like “fix,” “disrupt,” “turn,” and “block,” there is less understanding across the Army of these terms’ specific meaning in relation to linear obstacle effort per engagement area. For example, in an engagement area with a two-kilometer avenue of approach width, doctrine states that a block effect, with a resource factor of 2.4, requires a minimum of 4.8 kilometers of linear obstacle effort within that avenue of approach. Doctrine also says that brigades dictate the intent of an engagement area and let battalions decide where to place the obstacles within the brigade-defined obstacle belt. This approach at NTC often results in failure due to our inexact understanding of the above-mentioned doctrinal obstacle requirements.

Equipment. The Engineer Regiment suffers from maintenance concerns on key pieces of older countermobility equipment, such as the Volcano mine-laying system. When brigades arrive at NTC, some of them discover unpleasant readiness truths about their Volcanos, which, prior to coming to NTC, had been reported as fully mission capable. In order to accurately assess the Volcano’s maintenance status, units should run it through a complete rehearsal prior to arrival. Complicating this issue, though, is the fact that the Volcano typically is owned by the maneuver augmentation company, which usually is not organic to the training brigade and may not be even stationed on the same post.

Capt. Morgan’s call to “make defensive operations great again” is an important one. But unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Fixing some of these issues will require hard work—and even a different approach to both our institutional understanding of military history as well as our intellectual approach to tactical risk. Furthermore, at the brigade level, we face the significant challenges to skillfully executing defensive operations described above. That said, all is not lost. Of the seven rotational brigades I’ve worked with at NTC, at least two significantly improved their defensive operations over the course of the rotation and emplaced what I assessed was a very high quality defense in the live-fire portion of the exercise. We are making progress—I’ve seen it here at NTC—and I’m hopeful that this discussion of what I’ve seen will benefit other Army leaders, as they prepare both for decisive-action rotations at NTC and more generally for future conflicts that will not be kind to any force incapable of effective defensive operations.

Capt. Jared Hirschkorn is an active duty Army engineer officer. He commissioned from Officer Candidate School in July 2009. He served as a Route Clearance Platoon Leader in Afghanistan in 2010-11, and commanded the 523rd Engineer Support Company in Hawaii in 2016-17. He now serves as the ABE trainer on Bronco Team (Brigade Staff Trainers) at the National Training Center, Ft. Irwin, CA.

6 Comments

William Bell
on July 27, 2018 at 12:16 pm

The comments by CPT Hirschkorn on overwhelming Army preference for the offense go far beyond the tactical BCT fight. Even in the Army Title 10 wargames, the Army starts 'Unified Quest' with the beginning of Phase III operations. Despite the fact that against current regional peers, we expect the adversary to have the initiative, we ignore the transition from peace and deterrence to war and start with all our forces in place. Despite the knowledge of adversary anti-access and area denial plans, we start the wargames with everything ready to go and with little to know attrition. The same is true of Army experimentation efforts. The use of the defense to set conditions for the offense is ignored.

This article hits on a lot of great points. I guess I don’t understand a couple areas though. The article describes blade assets digging as early as possible, which is absolutely correct; however, it mentions digging survivability positions then AVD when the offense culminates. This implies digging surbivabilitu positions during the offense. My issue is this might work at NTC or other CTCs due to “resetting/repositioning” units, but it isn’t realistic to a true battlefield scenario. If a unit seizes terrain in the offense, they are not likely to retain that terrain by defending from somewhere to the rear where the BPs are. The BPs should be near the recently-seized terrain, which means digging cannot occur until the seizure is complete. Furthermore, we need to ensure maneuver personnel are near the BPs to help sight in VFPs with obstacles. I also do not recall doctrine mentioning brigades dictating obstacle intents in engagement areas. I believe ATP 3-90.8 mentions brigades determining belts, but the battalion level determines obstacle intent within those belts, including the engagement areas. Aside from clarifying these areas, this is article contains many great points.

Jesse M – In the interest of readability I did not go into some of the finer points/considerations. You have some good points and I'll try to answer them here.
To your point about "digging survivability positions during the offense." I am indeed implying that, due to there being four types of battle positions in doctrine (primary, alternate, supplementary, subsequent), it might be possible/advantageous in some situations to start digging at least the subsequent/supplementary positions during the offense if the commander has a limit of advance and if there is nothing else for the blades to work on. In other situations, sometimes simultaneous to the offense, it might be advantageous for a BCT to close off an avenue of approach (defensive task) with dig assets while primarily engaged in the offense. I guess what I'm getting at here is being able to execute "blurred transitions" between defense/offense as well as avoiding the binary thinking that BCTs do either offense or defense but not at the same time.
With regards to brigades determining belts….yes you are correct. What I am trying to get at is that we often struggle with this doctrinal approach to designing our defensive engagement areas due to our minimal proficiency in understanding what, for example, a block means in terms of linear obstacle effort. I've found that, due to the stress and lack of time at NTC, sometimes a directed obstacle approach from the brigade yields better results rather than the doctrinal mission command approach. Hope this is helpful.

I retired from Army as an Engineer officer in 2011 with 30 years of service. I am not surprised as I and my peers faced the same issues whether at NTC, or in CPX's . The same battles now were the same battles then: blade team utilization, the class iv/v haul, battle tracking, covering of obstacles with fires and/observations, reporting, maintenance of ERC A/B items and your pacing items while in rotation but I digress.

Training helps resolve the issues. But I believe that making the DS Engineer battalion the bill payor in restructuring the maneuver brigades has come home to roost. Reducing the battalion to two companies looks great (it briefed well). Not fully familiar with how it's done these but a maneuver battalion (in my time) was typically assigned a DS Sapper company. One could flow platoons in and out of companies as the situation changed but the captain and staff never changed. But now who speaks for the engineers at TF level with a brigade of 3 maneuver battalions and a cav squadron? A lot of friction is reduced with these issues if their is an Engineer in the TOC who can tell the commander why those issues are important, the so what? A reservist, or an outsider, does not bring the catchet needed to sell these issues to the commander.

Sir, thanks for your comment. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I think future warfare will have many of the same concerns as past warfare as long as we aim to seize and hold pieces of ground. I don't have as much historical context as yourself, but yes I do agree that utilizing the as BEB more of a mission command node for engineer efforts (to be augmented by additional engineer companies) has had some second/third order effects in terms of training (esp for the defense) and readiness. We still typically assign one each engineer company to the maneuver battalions, however, it may not always be a company that has an established working relationship with that battalion.

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